Thursday, May 26, 2016

Novaquark's Dual Universe -
billed a "Boundless MMO" by its creator - is certainly one ambitious
undertaking. So ambitious in fact, that it may just end up the harbinger of an
entirely new generation of MMO, one in which an unlimited number of players
will engage in a universe of exploration, intrigue, politics, military
conflict, crafting, mining and trade. The Dual Universe game world would be
comprised of millions of planets and its boundless nature also means that
players would be allowed to essentially build up their own little worlds within
it.

The brains behind the project
is Novaquark founder Jean-Christophe Baillie, who used to work for Aldebaran
Robotics and who came up with the technology behind the engine that is required
to run a game of the scope of Dual Universe. The first working prototype of the
game engine - which uses Continuous Single-Shard Cluster technology - was
created back in 2014. It essentially allows an unlimited number of players to
exist and act within a single, persistent and fully moddable universe. The
Novaquark team is comprised of former Ubisoft, Sony and Apple employees, so at
least theoretically, the potential to turn Dual Universe into reality is
definitely there.

The first objective of the team
is to create an alpha build of the game, which will essentially demo the game
engine as well as the CSSC technology under the hood, through some preliminary
gameplay features. This alpha stage is set to be reached in early 2017. From
there, the plan is to launch a long-term continuous development stage, from
which a fully functional and playable version would eventually arise. There are
already some screenshots available of the game, but it's obviously difficult to
determine the current development stage of the project based on these.

Philip Thalberg is a Dota 2 maniac, who has been
serving under the GosuTeam banner since 2004.